Hindsight bias: a by-product of knowledge updating?

With the benefit of feedback about the outcome of an event, people's recalled judgments are typically closer to the outcome of the event than their original judgments were. It has been suggested that this hindsight bias may be due to a reconstruction process of the prior judgment. A model of such a process is proposed that assumes that knowledge is updated after feedback and that reconstruction is based on the updated knowledge. Consistent with the model's predictions, the results of 2 studies show that knowledge after feedback is systematically shifted toward feedback, and that assisting retrieval of the knowledge prior to feedback reduces hindsight bias. In addition, the model accounts for about 75% of cases in which either hindsight bias or reversed hindsight bias occurred. The authors conclude that hindsight bias can be understood as a by-product of an adaptive process, namely the updating of knowledge after feedback.     

Individual Differences in Susceptibility to Misinformation Effects and Hindsight Bias

The present study examined individual differences in susceptibility to two similar forms of memory distortion: the misinformation effect and hindsight bias. The misinformation effect occurs when individuals witness an event, are provided with misinformation, and recall the original event as containing elements of the misinformation. Hindsight bias occurs when individuals make judgments, are provided with feedback, and recall their original judgments as being more similar to the feedback than they actually were. Seventy-five participants completed a misinformation task, a hindsight bias task, and several individual difference measures related to memory distortions. Working memory capacity was negatively correlated with the misinformation effect and hindsight bias, and the misinformation effect and hindsight bias were negatively correlated with one another. Although the misinformation effect and hindsight bias are measured with similar designs, and both are predicted by working memory capacity, the negative correlation between them suggests these phenomena result from somewhat different processes.     

A retrieval-based approach to eliminating hindsight bias

Individuals exhibit hindsight bias when they are unable to recall their original responses to novel questions after correct answers are provided to them. Prior studies have eliminated hindsight bias by modifying the conditions under which original judgments or correct answers are encoded. Here, we explored whether hindsight bias can be eliminated by manipulating the conditions that hold at retrieval. Our retrieval-based approach predicts that if the conditions at retrieval enable sufficient discrimination of memory representations of original judgments from memory representations of correct answers, then hindsight bias will be reduced or eliminated. Experiment 1 used the standard memory design to replicate the hindsight bias effect in middle-school students. Experiments 2 and 3 modified the retrieval phase of this design, instructing participants beforehand that they would be recalling both their original judgments and the correct answers. As predicted, this enabled participants to form compound retrieval cues that discriminated original judgment traces from correct answer traces, and eliminated hindsight bias. Experiment 4 found that when participants were not instructed beforehand that they would be making both recalls, they did not form discriminating retrieval cues, and hindsight bias returned. These experiments delineate the retrieval conditions that produce—and fail to produce—hindsight bias.     

The Effects of Feedback Source and Plausibility of Hindsight Bias

Whenever people try to recollect an earlier given estimate after they have received feedback about the true solution, they tend to overestimate what they had known in foresight. This phenomenon is known as “hindsight bias”. This paper reports three attempts to eliminate hindsight bias by labelling the feedback value as another person's estimate (instead of as the solution) and by providing extremely incorrect (instead of the true) values as feedback. Both variations, however alone and in combination failed to reduce hindsight bias. Only when the data were separated according to whether participants considered the feedback value plausible or not did cases of unbiased recollections emerge: Feedback values that were labelled as estimates of another person and found to be implausible did not lead to hindsight bias. This finding argues against the view that hindsight bias is an automatic and unavoidable effect of feedback presentation.     

No Reduction in Hindsight Bias after Complete Information and Repeated Testing

In hindsight, people often claim to have known more than they actually did. This finding has been termed hindsight bias. We report two hindsight-bias experiments which yielded converging results with different methods. All participants first estimated numerical values as answers to difficult knowledge questions, were later given the solutions, and were finally asked to recall their first estimates. In an attempt to reduce the typically found bias, the participants of one group in Experiment 1 were informed in advance about the experimental design and the bias phenomenon, while the participants of another group were not. In Experiment 2 all participants received at the end individual feedback about their recall performance and were then subjected to the same experimental procedure again, twice in succession. The amount of hindsight bias, however, remained unaffected by either of these two manipulations. These findings support automatic processes as explanation for the observed bias and dismiss motivational accounts.     

后见之明研究综述

后见之明指后见判断(可得益于事件结果反馈的判断)与先见判断(不知晓事件结果时的判断)的系统差异,其研究范式大体可分为两类,假定型设计和记忆型设计。后见效应的研究,具有重大的理论价值和应用价值。文章对后见效应的研究范式、研究结果、及其有关理论进行了简要综述,并对其应用价值加以评述。     

The effect of feedback on children’s metacognitive judgments: a heuristic account

In three experiments, we investigated whether the feedback effect on the accuracy of children’s metacognitive judgments results from an improvement in monitoring processes or the use of the Anchoring-and-Adjustment heuristic. Experiment 1 revealed that adding feedback increased the accuracy of young children’s (aged 4, 6, and 8 years) memory prediction. In Experiment 2, the influence of an external anchor on children’s metacognitive judgment was established. Finally, in Experiment 3, two memory tasks that differed in terms of difficulty were administered. Participants were randomly assigned to an anchoring (high/low/no anchor) and a feedback (feedback/no feedback) condition. Results demonstrated that children in the feedback condition adjusted their predictions toward the feedback, regardless of the task’s difficulty. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that external information provided by feedback is used as an anchor for judgment. This interpretation is strengthened by the correlation found between the two scores computed to assess participants’ susceptibility to anchoring and feedback effects, which indicates that children who are more sensitive to the anchoring effect are also more sensitive to the feedback effect.     

Judgments of learning are significantly higher following feedback on relatively good versus relatively poor trials despite no actual learning differences

Studies have consistently shown that prospective metacognitive judgments of learning are often inaccurate because humans mistakenly interpret current performance levels as valid indices of learning. These metacognitive discrepancies are strongly related to conditions of practice. Here, we examined how the type of feedback (after good versus poor trials) received during practice and awareness (aware versus unaware) of this manipulation affected judgments of learning and actual learning. After each six-trial block, participants received feedback on their three best trials or three worst trials and half of the participants were made explicitly aware of the type of feedback they received while the other half were unaware. Judgments of learning were made at the end of each six-trial block and before the 24-h retention test. Results indicated no motor performance differences between groups in practice or retention; however, receiving feedback on relatively good compared to relatively poor trials resulted in significantly higher judgments of learning in practice and retention, irrespective of awareness. These results suggest that KR on relatively good versus relatively poor trials can have dissociable effects on judgments of learning in the absence of actual learning differences, even when participants are made aware of their feedback manipulation.     

Effects of orienting task,spacing of repetitions,and list context on judgments of frequency

Subjects were given an unexpected frequency judgment test following a list of words in which items were presented either two, three, and five times or three, five, and seven times, with a spacing of 0, 2, 16, or 32 items between repetitions. During list presentation, they either rated the imagery value of each word or made continuous frequency estimates. Postlist frequency judgments of words presented three and five times were higher for the list containing words of Frequency 7, and judgments were also higher following the imagery rating task. Continuous judgments were unaffected by the list context and showed different effects of spacing than postlist judgments. The results provide support for the operation of response bias factors in the frequency judgment task and are relevant to theoretical interpretations of the spacing effect.     

Metacognitive Experiences and Human Judgment: The Case of Hindsight Bias and Its Debiasing

ABSTRACT— Theories of judgment have emphasized the influence of what comes to mind—the content of people's thoughts. But recent research shows that metacognitive experiences accompanying thinking, like a sense of the ease or difficulty with which information comes to mind, qualify the conclusions that people derive from thought content. The case of hindsight bias and attempts to remove that bias (debiasing) illustrate this. After an event outcome is known, people display hindsight bias by exaggerating its inevitability, believing they "knew it all along." The magnitude of hindsight bias varies with the ease or difficulty that known or alternative outcomes come to mind; the usually observed hindsight bias may even reverse when outcomes are difficult to bring to mind or increase when alternatives are difficult to bring to mind. Implications of metacognitive experiences can extend to other biases and their debiasing, as well as to how people make sense of the past more generally.     

The effects of mood and retrieval cues on semantic memory and metacognition

We investigated whether the previously established effect of mood on episodic memory generalizes to semantic memory and whether mood affects metacognitive judgments associated with the retrieval of semantic information. Sixty-eight participants were induced into a happy or sad mood by viewing and describing IAPS images. Following mood induction, participants saw a total of 200 general knowledge trivia items (50 open-ended and 50 multiple-choice after each of two mood inductions) and were asked to provide a metacognitive judgment about their knowledge for each item before providing a response. A sample trivia item is: Author – – To kill a mockingbird. Results indicate that mood affects the retrieval of semantic information, but only when the participant believes they possess the requested semantic information; furthermore, this effect depends upon the presence of retrieval cues. In addition, we found that mood does not affect the likelihood of different metacognitive judgments associated with the retrieval of semantic information, but that, in some cases, having retrieval cues increases accuracy of these metacognitive judgments. Our results suggest that semantic retrieval processes are minimally susceptible to the influence of affective state but does not preclude the possibility that affective state may influence encoding of semantic information.     

Accessibility experiences and the hindsight bias: I knew it all along versus it could never have happened

In two experiments, we tested accessibility experiences versus accessible content in influencing the hindsight bias when participants generated either thoughts about alternative outcomes or thoughts about known outcomes. Participants who had listed many thoughts (Experiment 1) and those who had contracted their brow muscles (Experiment 2) when considering alternate outcomes rated the known outcome as more likely than did than those who had listed two thoughts or who had not contracted their brows--a "backfire" effect. In contrast, but no less ironically, participants who had listed many thoughts and those who contracted their brows when considering known outcomes rated those outcomes as less likely--an "it could never have happened" effect. Both effects are due to subjective accessibility experiences, and their role in influencing and debiasing the hindsight bias is discussed.     

延时间隔和线索类型对遗忘学习判断的影响*

主要探讨不同延时间隔和线索类型对遗忘元认知判断的影响。采用传统的学习判断任务,让被试学习40对无意义配对词,并告知随后进行测试,当呈现第一个词时,被试能够回忆与之配对的后一个词。让被试预测当延迟不同时间（5分钟、1天和1周）进行测试时,他们能够记住（学习判断）或者遗忘（遗忘判断）后一词的可能性。最后,要求被试回忆所有词对。结果发现延时间隔对学习判断和遗忘判断有相似的影响;学习判断的等级和相对准确性均高于遗忘判断,说明人们对记住和遗忘的线索很敏感;相比于学习判断,人们监测自己遗忘能力的信心不足。研究结果表明人们能够利用延时间隔和线索类型来预测未来的测验成绩,对遗忘的监测能力低于对记住的监测。     

Hindsight bias redefined: It’s about time

Four experiments introduced a new conceptual and methodological approach to hindsight bias, traditionally defined as the tendency to exaggerate the a priori predictability of outcomes after they become known. By examining likelihood estimates rooted to specific time points during an unfolding event sequence (videos and short text stories), judged both in foresight and hindsight, we conceptualized hindsight bias as a contrast between two “inevitability curves,” which plotted likelihood against time. Taking timing into account, we defined three new indicators of accuracy: linear accuracy (how well hindsight judgments capture the linear trend of foresight judgments over time), rate accuracy (how well hindsight judgments reflect the slope of foresight judgments over time), and temporal accuracy (how well hindsight judgments specify the overall timing of the full envelope of foresight judgments). Results demonstrated that hindsight judgments showed linear and rate accuracy, but were biased only in terms of lack of temporal accuracy. The oft-used catchphrase “knew it all along effect” was found to be a misnomer, in that participants were well aware in hindsight that their earlier foresight judgments reflected uncertainty. The current research therefore points to one way in which retrospective judgments can be considered biased, yet simultaneously suggests that considerable accuracy exists when people render such judgments.     

Hindsight bias in gustatory judgments

Being in hindsight, people tend to overestimate what they had known in foresight. This phenomenon has been studied for a wide variety of knowledge domains (e.g., episodes with uncertain outcomes, or solutions to almanac questions). As a result of these studies, hindsight bias turned out to be a robust phenomenon. In this paper, we present two experiments that successfully extended the domain of hindsight bias to gustatory judgments. Participants tasted different food items and were asked to estimate the quantity of a certain ingredient, for example, the residual sugar in a white wine. Judgments in both experiments were systematically biased towards previously presented low or high values that were labeled as the true quantities. Thus, hindsight bias can be considered a phenomenon that extends well beyond the judgment domains studied so far.     

重量对元认知监控的无意识影响

采用结构知识归因的方法,以学习判断和项目优先选择作为元认知监测和控制的指标,考察重量对元认知监控的影响是否是无意识的。被试学习粘贴在不同重量纸盒上的词对,进行学习判断(实验1)或项目选择(实验2),并报告其判断或选择的依据。结果:(1)重量影响学习判断和项目优先选择,相对于轻纸盒,被试给予重纸盒上的词对更高的JOL并优先选择重纸盒上的词对进行学习;(2)重量对学习判断的影响只发生在判断依据为猜测的情况下,重量对项目优先选择的影响只发生在判断依据为猜测和直觉的情况下。上述结果支持了元认知的具身性,并提示重量对元认知监控的影响可能是无意识的。     

Children's metamemorial judgments in an event recall task

Two studies were conducted in which two different indicators of metacognitive monitoring were investigated in a complex everyday memory task. In the first phase of each experiment, 8- and 10-year-olds as well as adults were shown a short event (video) and gave judgments of learning, that is, rated their certainty that they would later be able to recall specific details correctly. In the second phase of the experiments, participants underwent a memory interview about the event and in Study 2 also gave confidence judgments, that is, rated their certainty that the provided answers to the memory questions were correct. Results revealed significant influences of memory characteristics on monitoring in that delaying judgments and monitoring judgments concerning irretrievable information affected judgments of learning. From 8 years of age onward, there were relatively appropriate metamemorial monitoring abilities in both indicators. Moderate intraindividual consistency was found across the two measures of metacognitive monitoring, with a tendency toward higher consistency in older age groups. The results are discussed in terms of the adequacy of the underlying theoretical construct.     

The Role of Cognitive Ability in Self‐Efficacy and Self‐Assessed Test Performance1

Research has shown that test takers are often unable to assess their own test performance accurately. However, the role of cognitive ability in assessing one's test performance has not been explored. We examined whether high cognitive ability participants were better than low cognitive ability participants in assessing their performance on a video‐based situational judgment test (SJT) of customer‐service skills. Results indicated a strong relationship between actual and perceived SJT performance for high cognitive ability participants, but no relationship for those low in cognitive ability. The discussion focuses on implications for metacognitive theory, test perceptions, and providing feedback to applicants.     

The effects of source and type of feedback on child witnesses' metamemory accuracy

This study investigated the effect of feedback on the accuracy (realism) of 12‐year‐old children's metacognitive judgments of their answers to questions about a film clip. Two types of judgments were investigated: confidence judgments (on each question) and frequency judgments (i.e. estimates of overall accuracy). The source of feedback, whether it was presented as provided by a teacher or a peer child, did not influence metacognitive accuracy. Four types of feedback were given depending on whether the participant's answer was correct and depending on whether the feedback confirmed or disconfirmed the child's answer. The children showed large overconfidence when they received confirmatory feedback but much less so when they received disconfirmatory feedback. The children gave frequency judgments implying that they had more correct answers than they actually had. No main gender differences were found for any of the measures. The results indicate a high degree of malleability in children's metacognitive judgments. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

模拟法官决策中心理控制源对后见偏差的影响

考察模拟法官决策中心理控制源对后见偏差的影响。实验采用2（心理控制源：外控型、内控型）×3（有无策略：后见组、分散注意组、指导组）两因素被试间实验设计。采用自编两个案例及问卷测查模拟法官决策中后见效应的差异。实验结果发现,不同心理控制源是导致模拟法官决策中后见偏差存在差异的影响因素。同时,两种策略都能够有效减少模拟法官决策中的后见偏差。